Monday Eye Candy: American Urban Form

Happy Monday! Today’s eye candy is from American Urban Form: A Representative History, by Sam Bass Warner and Andrew H. Whittemore. This book discusses the evolution of the American city, but does so using a hypothetical “City”—a city constructed by combining the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The illustrations in the book are pen-and-ink drawings done by Whittemore (click on each image to enlarge).

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1.1 The City as it appeared in the late seventeenth century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2.2 Long Wharf and King’s Road, mid-eighteenth century. From the Long Wharf, visible at the bottom of this picture, a street ran inland to its intersection with the “Broad Way.” 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3.3 At the harbor, 1820. Nineteenth-century brigs, quite a bit higher than all construction in town except for church steeples, docked at a crowded waterfront to unload their cargos of molasses, turpentine, and manufactures of Europe and the Far East.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6.4 Amusement park, 1925. On the shore of the bay, at the terminus of several transit lines, a privately run recreational park thrived from after the Civil War until the 1950s. At first it was modest, consisting of groomed beaches and bathhouses. By the 1920s, however, it featured a boardwalk, numerous commercial stalls, a Ferris wheel, and a rollercoaster. With suburbanization and the availability of home entertainment, the park’s popularity declined, and it eventually closed in the 1960s.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9.1 The City as it appeared in 2000.